SOCIAL STUDIES NOTES: GRADE 8, TEST 2
TECHBOOK SECTION 2.3-2.5 SOUTHERN & MIDDLE COLONIES
The Middle Colonies
I. Geography of the Middle Colonies
-Four states made up the Middle Colonies: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
-Middle Colony farmers had an easier time than farmers in New England. The climate was warmer with a longer growing season. The fertile soil was well suited for crops like wheat, fruits, and vegetables.
II. New York and New Jersey
-New York began as the Dutch colony of New Netherland. By the 1660s it was an economic success. Farmers were prosperous, and the colony was a base for a profitable fur trade between the Dutch and the Native Americans.
-The Dutch also made money trading with merchants in the British colonies. This violated Britain’s mercantile laws and angered the government.
-Tension also existed between England and Holland. New Netherland separated England’s northern colonies from its colonies farther south. Furthermore, England and Holland were rivals at trade.
-In 1664, England’s King Charles II granted the right to all Dutch lands in North America to his brother James. James sent a few warships and the Dutch surrendered immediately.
-The colony was renamed New York, after James, the Duke of York. New Amsterdam, its capital, became New York City.
-New Jersey was established in 1665, when part of southern New York was split off to form a new colony. Like New York and several other colonies, New Jersey at first was a proprietary colony-a colony created by a grant of land from a monarch to an individual or family.
-In 1702, New Jersey received a new charter as a royal colony-a colony controlled directly by the king.
III. Pennsylvania and Delaware
-In the 1640s and 1650s, the Quakers were one of a number of new religious groups in England. Their ideas set them apart from most groups including the Puritans.
-The Quakers believed that all people had a direct link or “inner light” with God. Groups of Quakers, therefore, did not need a minister.
-Another fundamental Quaker belief was that all people were equal in God’s eyes. Thus, they were among the first in England to speak out against slavery. Women were considered equal to men in spiritual matters and often were leaders in Quaker meetings.
-By the 1660s, there were thousands of Quakers in England. Many of them refused to pay taxes to support the Church of England.
-Because of their views, they often suffered from persecution.
-One Quaker leader was William Penn, a wealthy man who personally knew King Charles II. Penn wanted to find a place for Quakers to live where they would be safe from persecution.
-He used his connections to get a charter from the king for a new colony in North America. In 1681, he received an area almost as large as England itself, mainly in what is now Pennsylvania.
-Penn arrived in his colony in 1682. Soon settlers from many places began arriving.
-Penn considered his colony to be a “holy experiment.” His goal was to create a colony in which people from different religious backgrounds could live peacefully.
-In 1682, Penn wrote his Frame of Government for Pennsylvania. It granted the colony an elected assembly and provided for freedom of religion.
-Penn tried to deal fairly with Native Americans. He did not allow colonists to settle on land until the Native Americans sold it to them.
-People from Sweden were the first settlers in Delaware. The Dutch took control of the territory in the 1650s, but they lost it to the English when they lost New York.
-Penn’s charter for Pennsylvania included Delaware. Because Delaware settlers did not want to send delegates to a distant assembly in Philadelphia, Penn gave the area its own representative assembly. In 1704, Delaware became a separate colony.
IV. Growth and Change
-By the early 1700s, more than 20,000 colonists lived in Pennsylvania. Farms were so productive that farmers grew more than they could use and sold the balance. Wheat, the top cash crop, was sold to customers in New England and abroad. That is why the Middle Colonies were called the “breadbasket of the colonies.”
-Manufacturing was just beginning in the colonies during the 1700s. the largest manufacturers produced iron, flour, and paper. Artisans worked as shoemakers, carpenters, masons, coopers, and weavers.
-The western section of Pennsylvania was part of a region called the backcountry that extended through several colonies from Pennsylvania to Georgia.
-Many of the people who settled in the backcountry were not English. Thousands were Scotch-Irish. Originally from Scotland, they had settled in Ireland before coming to North America.
-Large numbers of German immigrants began arriving in the 1700s. They described themselves as “Deutsch” for German. Americans thought they were saying Dutch. As a result, German immigrants in Pennsylvania were called the Pennsylvania Dutch.
-By the middle of the 1700s, many settlers were pushing south and west along a route that led from Pennsylvania to Georgia that was called the Great Wagon Road.
-By 1750, the non-English immigrants had made the Middle Colonies the most diverse part of English North America. Philadelphia and New York had become the largest cities and busiest ports in the colonies.
-All the colonies had thriving economies.
Section 4: The Southern Colonies
I. Geography of the Southern Colonies
-During the 1760s, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were hired to settle a boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania. They conducted a survey that took four years to complete.
-The boundary they drew is known as the Mason-Dixon Line. After the American Revolution, it was the dividing line between the northern states where slavery was abolished and the southern states where slavery persisted.
-Five colonies were located south of the Mason-Dixon Line: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
-The climate of these states is warm and humid. Hot summers provide a long growing season that colonial farmers used to raise crops such as rice and tobacco.
-Both crops required many workers in the fields and thus were partly responsible for helping to spur the early development of slavery.
II. Virginia Grows
-Virginia’s population grew slowly during the 1600s. After 1650, the population increased more quickly. By 1670, 40,000 settlers lived in Virginia.
-As Virginia’s white population grew, the Native American population shrank. Disease and violence took its toll.
-Farmers took over more land to plant tobacco which led to trouble with the Native Americans. There were two violent confrontations-one in 1622 and the other in 1644. Although Native Americans killed hundreds of colonists, they were defeated both times.
-After 1644, Native Americans living near the coast had to accept English rule.
-Beginning in the 1660s, wealthy Virginia tobacco planters bought most of the good farmland near the coast. This left no land for poorer colonists who wanted to start their own farms, angering many who had to work the land for others. In addition, these poorer colonists could not vote without property.
-Many of the poor colonists moved inland to find good farmland, but there came into conflict with the Native Americans who lived there.
-When the governor refused to take strong measures against the Native Americans, Nathaniel Bacon organized a force of 1,000 frontier settlers and began to attack and kill Native Americans.
-The governor declared that Bacon and his men were rebels. Bacon reacted by attacking Jamestown and burning it to the ground.
-The revolt, known as Bacon’s Rebellion, collapsed when Bacon became sick and died. The governor hanged 23 of Bacon’s followers, but he was still unable to stop English settlers from moving onto Native American lands.
III. Religious Toleration in Maryland
-In 1632, King Charles I granted a charter for a new colony to George Calvert, an English Catholic. Catholics suffered great discrimination in England. Calvert aimed to set up a colony where Catholics could live safely.
-The first settlers included both Catholics and Protestants. They grew tobacco and harvested the sea life of Chesapeake Bay.
-When Calvert died, his son, Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, became the proprietor.
-When tension between Catholics and Protestants arose, Lord Baltimore got the assembly to pass the Act of Toleration in 1649. It welcomed all Christians and gave adult Christian males the right to vote and hold office.
IV. Colonies in the Carolinas and Georgia
-By the 1600s, a few settlers from Virginia had moved south beyond the colony’s borders. In 1663, King Charles II granted a charter for a new colony to be established there, in the area called Carolina.
-The northern part of Carolina developed slowly. It lacked harbors and rivers on which ships could travel easily. Settlers lived on small farms raising and exporting tobacco.
-The southern part of Carolina grew more quickly. Sugar grew well in the swampy lowlands. Many planters came from Barbados in the West Indies bringing with them enslaved peoples to grow the sugar. Soon the colonists were using slave labor to grow what would become the area’s most important crop, rice.
-Eventually, Carolina split into two colonies: North Carolina and South Carolina.
-The last of England’s 13 colonies Georgia, was founded for two reasons. First, fearing that Spain was about to expand its Florida colony northward, the English looked to found a colony south of Carolina to keep the Spanish bottled up.
-Second, a group of wealthy Englishmen led by James Oglethorpe wanted a colony where there would be protection for English debtors.
-Georgia’s founders wanted Georgia to be a colony of small farms, not large plantations. Therefore, slavery was banned. However, this restriction did not last and by 1750 slavery was legal in Georgia.
V. Change in the Southern Colonies
-During the 1700s, the Southern Colonies developed two distinct ways of life. The people along the coast lived very differently from people who settled inland on the frontier.
-The most important feature of life along the coast in the Southern Colonies was the plantation. There, crops such as cotton, sugar, and rice were grown.
-Plantations dominated the economy in the Tidewater region.
-The Tidewater region in South Carolina and Georgia was well suited for rice. Because large numbers of workers are needed to grow this crop, the enslaved population eventually outnumbered the free population in South Carolina.
-The plantation system did not just create a society of slaveholders and enslaved people in the Tidewater. It also divided the white community into a small group of wealthy people and a much larger group with little or no property, most of whom were poor and lived in the backcountry South.
-The backcountry was cut off from the coast by poor roads and long distances. Families usually lived on isolated farms. They often did not own the land they farmed, and many lived in one-room shacks. Few had servants or enslaved people to help with the work.
-Backcountry people believed that the colonial governments on the coast did not care about them, but cared only about protecting the wealth of the Tidewater plantation owners.
Section 5: Spanish Colonies on the Borderlands
I. Spanish Florida
-While English colonies were forming along the coast, Spanish colonies in the Americas were already hundreds of years old.
-Spain had planted colonies in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America. Spain’s first colonies in the area that is today the United States were established on the peninsula of Florida.
-Spanish explorers reached Florida early in the 1500s. In 1565, fearing that France might take over the area, Spain built a fort called St. Augustine in northern Florida. It was the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States.
-As English colonies spread southward, Spanish control was threatened. To weaken the English colonies, in 1693, the Spanish announced that enslaved Africans who escaped to Florida would be protected and given land if they helped to defend the colony.
II. Settling the Spanish Borderlands
-Spain’s most important colonies were in Mexico and South America. Its territories north of Mexico were called the borderlands. The main function of the borderland was to protect Mexico from other European powers.
-The borderlands began in the east with Florida. Farther west, they included most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California.
-In 1598, Juan de Onate led an expedition into Mexico to find gold, convert Native Americans to Christianity, and establish a permanent colony. Onate never found gold, but he did establish Spain’s first permanent settlement in the region at Santa Fe.
-Onate brought more than 300 horses which were looked after by Native Americans. When some Native Americans ran away from the Spanish, they spread the skill of horseback riding from one Native American group to another. This skill forever changed the lives of the Native Americans in the region.
-The Native Americans suffered greatly under Spanish rule. In 1680, several groups in New Mexico rebelled and temporarily drove the Spanish from the region.
-Because their main purpose was to convert Native Americans to Christianity, Roman Catholic missionaries established missions in the borderlands. At the missions, priests taught about Catholicism and made Native Americans work by set rules.
-Spain’s California missions were especially important. Spain began colonizing California in 1769. The Spanish founded missions in what are now the cities of San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
-Along with missions, the Spanish sent soldiers. They set up presidios to defend the missions.
-The Spanish also established pueblos-civilian towns. They were centers of farming and trade.
III. Life in Spanish Missions
-Thousands of Native Americans labored at Spanish missions. They farmed, built churches, and learned a wide variety of crafts.
-Native Americans worked from five to eight hours a day and five or six days a week. However, the Native Americans did not have control over their lives. They were punished harshly if they violated the rules.
-Native Americans often rebelled against such treatment.
-Meanwhile, their population fell as thousands died because of poor living conditions and European diseases.